It’s only been a few days since my review on Astaro Secure Gateway and it’s time for an other update. Apparently Astaro and Sophos will merge together. Today I received an email from Jan Hichert to announce the news.

Quote:

Several months ago Sophos approached Astaro with the idea to bring the two companies together and merge the award-winning Sophos Endpoint Security with the award-winning Astaro Security Gateway in order to bring security to the next level. And we are proud to announce that this will indeed happen, as we have now signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by Sophos.

End of Quote:

My biggest concern was the free home license, but this will remain free

More Features: Sophos owns great technology in many areas like NAC, DLP, Patch Management, Vulnerability Scanning and more. We now have access to and can integrate these technologies into our Security Gateway, further improving on our ability to protect your entire network.

Best Malware Engines: Sophos has one of the best malware engines available and their continuous problem free updates through SophosLabs will make our product the best in its class.

Better Performance: We want to further improve the performance of the UTM functions, but in the past were often limited as the vendors we license technology from were not always cooperative. With direct access to the experts at Sophos, we are able to offer tighter integration and significantly improve performance.

Better Support: As a growing company, scaling high quality support is always a challenge, with Sophos’ expertise and processes in 24×7 support, combined with our support experts, we can deliver a more responsive and better support than ever.

Free Licenses Will Stay: The Astaro customer and user community has been an important part of our success in the past and will be in the future. Therefore we do not plan to change the home and essential firewall licenses.

Focused Management Team: Astaro will continue within Sophos and will be run by the same management team and employees as today. We will strengthen our strategy on offering complete solutions and our focus will continue to be on solving end-user security issues.

As promised, a short review on the Astaro 8.2 Secure Web Gateway. Before you continue reading, this is a review not a tutorial on how to install this proxy / firewall appliance. The setup of this device (the this is now working but doesn’t do anything useful kinda setup) took me only 15 min. After that I configured and tested for hours and probably days. To be honest I’m still discovering new features every day.

I want to make clear that this software is free for home purposes! Also you can have a trail version for 30 days if you like to test it in a business environment. I’ve got the Astaro 8.2 running virtually on a Debian server. I use KVM to manage my virtual machines. Currently I’m experimenting with the OpenQRM platform to manage my private “cloud” (for the record, it’s failing)